Ahead of the New Zealand Skeptics’ annual conference, the Otago Daily Times‘ Shane Gilchrist interviewed media spokeswoman Vicki Hyde about the society’s take on Ken Ring, Chinese medicine and science journalism.

An excerpt (read in full here):

Taking aim at the inane

It is particularly fitting the New Zealand Skeptics’ annual conference this weekend is being held in Christchurch.

For its 2011 Bent Spoon Award (for “journalistic gullibility”), the group has cited the media promulgation of Ken Ring’s false predictions of an earthquake on March 20, which contributed to legions of people either leaving the already shaken South Island city or stocking up on petrol, water and other disaster supplies.

Building on solid science is the theme for this year’s annual conference, which will feature presentations on earthquake science and “non-science”, psychics and the controversial use of 1080.

Given 2011 is the International Year of Chemistry, there will also be a discussion on whether an understanding of basic chemistry can help protect people from pseudo-scientific claims and ideas.

“When we’re unsure of things, looking for a better understanding of what’s happening and why it’s happening empowers people,” says Skeptics media spokeswoman Vicki Hyde.

. . .

“Often, in the case of the media, we have a high churn rate of stories. So when journalists see something they haven’t encountered before, they get excitable. Broadcast media, in particular, don’t want to explain things because that takes time.”

She also laments a lack of science-based knowledge within the media in general.

“You wouldn’t send a reporter out to cover a rugby game if they had no understanding of the offside rules or how much a try was worth. But, time after time, I’ve seen reporters cover a scientific issue when, clearly, they have no background knowledge.

“In New Zealand, we have never really had science journalism as a specialty. I remember when one of the polytechnics put out a journalism handbook and the nearest thing it had to science was a section on the weather.”

In looking for “balance” in an article, a reporter might seek comment from a range of sources.

Yet, in regards to scientific issues, there aren’t necessarily two equal and opposite opinions, Ms Hyde emphasises.

The BBC does a good job of covering science in its radio, television and web programming, according to a review commissioned by the BBC trust. However, the UK broadcaster should not be too quick to congratulate itself – the review also notes there are some areas in which the BBC could be doing a lot better.

In 2010 the BBC Trust – the  body which determines the course of the publically funded BBC – commissioned Steve Jones, Emeritus Professor of Genetics at University College London and the  Science Communication Group at Imperial College London to review the BBC’s coverage of science.

The final report from the review, released today, congratulated the BBC for good coverage generally, but noted some areas that could be improved upon. Specifically, the reviewers found that a narrow range of external sources were used in reporting on science issues, there appeared to be a lack of contact and collaboration between divisions of the corporation and accuracy may be eschewed for the impression of editorial impartiality in coverage of scientific debate.

You can read the full report here.

Our colleagues at the UK Science Media Centre collected reaction from key figures in the science sector. For more information please contact the SMC NZ (smc@sciencemediacentre.co.nz; 04 499 5476)

Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science, said:

“The former newsreader, Peter Sissons, claims in his autobiography that the BBC Trust report was commissioned in January 2010 as a response to blog campaigns by self-proclaimed ‘sceptics’ against the Corporation’s coverage of climate change. But one major response to this important report should be for the BBC to make stronger efforts to uphold the public interest by challenging the inaccurate and misleading claims of bloggers, campaigners and politicians who reject and deny the findings of mainstream science for ideological reasons.

“The BBC is required by law not to sacrifice accuracy for impartiality in the coverage of controversial scientific issues such as climate change. Yet, it is well known that there are particular BBC presenters and editors who allow self-proclaimed climate change ‘sceptics’ to mislead the public with unsubstantiated and inaccurate statements. For instance, the BBC TV programme ‘The Daily Politics’ recently allowed one ‘sceptic’ to assert, unchallenged, that “pensioners will literally die” as result of the UK’s climate change policies, and another to wrongly imply that the rise of nearly 40 per cent in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide might be due to natural causes.

“While the BBC has many excellent reporters, it is time for editors and presenters to stop giving an easy ride to those who mislead the public over scientific issues such as climate change.”

Dr Gail Cardew, Director of Science and Education at the Royal Institution said:

“The Royal Institution welcomes Prof Steve Jones’ recommendations in the BBC Trust review of science to address the issue of balance versus objectivity in communicating science. Like the BBC, the Ri hopes to stimulate lively debate around contentious issues whilst portraying an accurate view of the scientific consensus. The Ri will be exploring this report further at an event in conjunction with the BBC and ABSW in September.”

Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, said:

“The BBC has played a significant part in creating the current surge of interest in science.  The way in which it covers science is generally of a very high quality.  It is, however, important that the need to separate opinion from evidence in coverage of some topics has been recognised.  It is important to have debate but marginal opinion, prominently expressed but not well based on evidence, can mislead the audience.  The BBC usually respects this but the challenge is to get it right all of the time.”

Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust said:

“BBC coverage of science is usually of a high standard and has the potential to become world-leading if the BBC, as it promises, implements fully the recommendations of the excellent report by Professor Steve Jones.  His report highlights the issue that, from time to time, a drive for ‘impartiality at any cost’ by the BBC can lead to a highly misleading presentation of science in situations where the evidence points overwhelmingly in one direction rather than another. It is encouraging that the BBC Executive and BBC Trust accept this criticism and will work with programme makers to improve their understanding of this issue.”

Science Media Centres now exist in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and  Japan, with more on the horizon. But what are the challenges this growing network of centres face and how should they be tackling them?

At the World Conference of Science Journalists in Doha, Qatar, the representatives from Science Media Centres met to talk about how they perform their core functions.  The breakout conference session was based around one the year’s biggest science stories, the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

Covering Japan’s Nuclear Crisis: Do Science Media Centres Contribute to Sense or Promote Spin?

Podcast

Q&A

Debate rages in the blogopshere on the coverage of Japan. And role of the SMCs, as providers of science information, is under scrutiny.

The Science Media Centre model started in the UK 8 years ago. Now there are SMCs in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan and soon, in Denmark. Set up to help journalists cover science when it hits the headlines, the SMCs were at the forefront as the media covered the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear reactor crisis.

But did they in fact manipulate the media by only putting forward “pro”-nuclear scientists – scientists who repeated phrases like “negligible” and “many orders of magnitude below” to an increasingly nervous public? Is there a tendency for some scientists to underplay their concerns for fear of being tagged “anti-nuclear”? Did editors ultimately go with the most alarming narrative because the nuclear scientists were presumed to be ‘playing down’ the threat? What role did the SMCs play in putting forward accurate information the public needed to hear? Ultimately, did the SMCs help or hinder the journalists?

Producer

Penny Park, Science Media Centre of Canada (Canada)

Moderator

Veronique Morin, freelance (Canada)

Panelists

Fiona Fox, SMC UK (UK)

Susannah Eliott, Australia SMC (Australia)

Penny Park, SMCC (Canada)

Motoko Kakubayashi, SMC Japan (Japan)

Connie St Louis (Chair of the Association of British Science Writers)

I’m at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Doha, Qatar where scientists, journalists and science press officers from around the world have been gathering to discuss the future of science journalism.

I’ll be writing up posts over the next few days on the more interesting sessions I’ve been to (of those, there are many) but I wanted to start with the discussion generated by a panel discussion looking at the worrying trend towards scientists who work for Government-owned organisations being discouraged or even banned from publicly discussing science-related issues.

Perhaps the examples presented from Russia and China are not surprising given those countries’ well known track record on human rights abuses. But we also heard from a Canadian science journalist who outlined the extent to which state-employed scientists have been muzzled in recent years.

Russia – scientists jailed

Such is the humility of Russian science journalist and environmentalist Grigory Pasko, that during his WCSJ appearance he didn’t once mention the years he spent in prison between 2001 and 2003 on an espionage conviction that was widely criticized by the global community and which saw him labelled a “prisoner of conscience” by Amnesty International.

In the late 1990s, Pasko supplied information, video tapes and reports to Japanese broadcaster NHK that detailed the dumping of old weapons and nuclear waste in the sea of Japan by the Russian military. The problem was that Pasko was a military officer, writing for Battle Watch, the in-house newspaper of the Russian Pacific Fleet.

Once Pasko was linked to the reports in Japan he was arrested and in 2001 stood trial facing 10 charges. In the end, he was convicted of a single espionage charge and sentenced to four years prison (including 20 months he had already served in custody).

Continue reading Peter’s full post on SciBlogs here.

Last night in London, Dr Ben Goldacre debated with Lord Drayson the state of science reporting in Britain.

Dr Ben Goldacre is author of the book (and column) Bad Science, and has become well-known for criticising science reporting in the UK.  His debating opponent, Lord Drayson, is the UK’s Science Minister, who contends that the standard is actually quite high, and has greatly improved over the years.

The debate, which promised to be lively, was streamed live on Thursday night – a taster of it can be listened to here. The video of the full debate is also available, and can be seen here.

Since the debate, Lord Drayson, who defended science reporting against Goldacre’s criticisms, has promised to investigate any cases brought to him by scientists who feel they have been mispresented in the press.  The full article about the debate, written by Zoe Corbyn of the Times Higher Education Supplement, can be found here.

If the editors and senior producers gathered at the World Congress of Science Journalists to debate whether science journalism is in crisis were generally unconvincing in their assertions that science journalism is actually in good shape, one presentation showed what can be achieved when a media organisation makes science coverage a priority.

Ian Katz (photo: Guardian)

The Guardian’s deputy editor, Ian Katz, said the paper’s early commitment to environmental reporting had won it not only praise but readers of the print edition and the website (which attracts 27 million readers each month).

Click on the player below to listen to Katz’s presentation at the WCSJ

One of the best things about mixing and mingling with the 900 or so science journalists and communications officers gathered at the World Conference of Science Journalists, is learning about how science communication is done in other parts of the world.

And today, science communicators from western countries were given a sobering insight into how science journalism works in parts of the developing world, where a huge amount of science is underway but is largely overlooked by local media.

Pseudo science from “experts” promising cures for AIDS and other diseases often grab headlines without the claims being properly verified.

“Those are the people that journalists will flock after,” said Diran Onifade, a journalist at Nigerian TV.

Onifade also outlined the corruption in the science system in many African nations that results in bribes being paid to buy prominent media exposure for scientific institutions.

As Onifade put it, an institution being visited by a wealthy philanthropist like Bill Gates can easily get a photo of the institute boss shaking hands with Gates on the front page of the national newspaper – as long as the price is right. The “off the books” transactions are a fact of life for scientific institutions public relations officers, said Onifade. The typical calculation is “X plus 1″ or “X plus 10″ – X being the amount a PR officer is willing to pay to have a story place, the figure following it being the additional amount the journalist or editor demands to publish the story.

With numerous clinical trials underway in African countries as drugs to treat everything from HIV to tuberculosis are tested, there’s a growing demand for skilled local journalists to accurately report the progress of such trials. But Onifade said such journalists were still thin on the ground.

“The people with the skills to pore through the facts and figures. They are not many.”

In the Middle East, science journalists have their own unique set of problems with language barriers and a lack of sophistication among science communication officers holding back science communication efforts.

“It’s always easier for me to know what’s happening in the US than it is to know what’s happening in the institution just across the street,” said Nadia El Awady, a Cairo-based science journalist.

This week the World Conference of Science Journalists gets underway in London.  Over 800 journalists and science communicators will gather to debate the crucial issues for their profession — how to survive, avoid pitfalls and even raise the standards of science journalism in a rapidly changing global media landscape.

The SMC’s Peter Griffin will be blogging and posting podcasts from the event all this week. Stay tuned to the Science Media Centre’s website for updates.

The conference has sparked a host of related coverage. The latest issue of Nature carries an extensive Science Journalism special feature to coincide, and other sites like the Knight Science Journalism Tracker have offered up some pithy commentary.

Among the many hot topics on the agenda, a session titled, “Is science journalism in crisis?” will delve into the implications of recent newsroom cutbacks and loss of specialist jobs.  Cristine Russell, President of the US Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, kicked off a recent preview of this session with the following, sobering figures on science journalism in the States:

Membership of the USA science journalism association, the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), stands at over 2000 but of these only 79 are now full time staff science writers for newspapers. The decreasing number of staff science writers is no doubt linked to cutbacks in the number of science sections in US papers, which have decreased by more than half from 95 in 1989 to 34 in 2005. The Boston Globe is an example of this process in action: First the health and science section moved inside the news section, then in January 2008 it went from 3 to 2 pages and by March it had been cut altogether. Health is now covered in the lifestyle section and science and technology in the business section with an emphasis on technology.

Despite the pressures, participants argue that there is a vital need for science journalists to carry on finding new outlets for their work. Another speaker, WFSJ President Pallab Ghosh, offers this analysis of science journalism’s changing role: “Once upon a time our job was to translate and enthuse about science. Now it’s to provide mature, independent analysis of scientific developments that will shape the future destiny of communities across the world.”